Why are we forked creatures instead of tumbling beach balls of undifferentiated cells?

An embryo begins by dividing into identical cells, but within hours these cells begin to make genetic decisions, turning off some genes and turning on others. So the ball of cells acquires a front end and a back end, a top and a bottom, nerve cells and muscles cells, all still carrying the same DNA, but DNA now packaged in such a way that some genes are shrink wrapped and silent but others are spread-eagled for easy access and active.

Want to know if you can be the king of Donkey Kong?    A group of researchers say they can predict "with unprecedented accuracy" how well you will do on a complex task like a strategic video game - by analyzing activity in a specific region of your brain.

Instead of measuring how brain activity differs before and after subjects learn a complex task, the researchers analyzed background activity in the basal ganglia, a group of brain structures known to be important for procedural learning, coordinated movement and feelings of reward.

Forget spray-on tans, new research in Evolution and Human Behaviour says eating carrots and tomatoes gives you a more healthy tan than even the sun.

Dr Ian Stephen, from the School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus, led the research and said, "Most people think the best way to improve skin colour is to get a suntan, but our research shows that eating lots of fruit and vegetables is actually more effective."

Stereotypes exist for a reason.  They give us a comfortable idea of what we are dealing with, based on experience or at least perception.   Gender stereotypes suggest that men are usually tough and women are usually tender but it turns out stereotypes may be more than experience to our brains.

In a new Psychological Science study,  when subjects looked at a gender-neutral face, they were more likely to judge it as male if they were touching something hard and female if they were touching something soft.

The American Diabetes Association estimates that nearly 24 million children and adults in the U.S. have diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is the most common form of the disease and accounts for about 90 to 95 percent of these cases.

Some studies have shown that coffee may be protective against type 2 diabetes.  No one has determined why but researchers at UCLA have discovered a possible molecular mechanism behind coffee's protective effect.  The protein sex hormone–binding globulin (SHBG) regulates the biological activity of the body's sex hormones, testosterone and estrogen, which have long been thought to play a role in the development of type 2 diabetes. And coffee consumption, a new study in Diabetes says, increases plasma levels of SHBG. 

Observations done at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Hawaii's Mauna Kea have found 16 close-knit pairs of supermassive black holes in merging galaxies.

These black-hole pairs, also called binaries, are about a hundred to a thousand times closer together than most that have been observed before, providing astronomers a glimpse into how these behemoths and their host galaxies merge—a crucial part of understanding the evolution of the universe. Although few similarly close pairs have been seen previously, this is the largest population of such objects observed as the result of a systematic search.